The billionaire owner of Costcutter has increased his company’s exposure to Sainsbury’s less than a week after revealing its initial investment in the supermarket (The Times £).
Bestway, which is Britain’s seventh-largest family-owned business with turnover of around £4.5bn, has hiked its Sainsbury’s stake from 3.45% to approximately 4.47% as of Wednesday morning, a regulatory filing reveals (The Mail).
Suddenly Aldi and Lidl are no longer Sainsbury’s biggest problems, a business editorial in The Telegraph argues, with the Bestway raid leaving the supermarket CEO Simon Roberts with “an almighty headache that he definitely didn’t need”.
Aldi has lost a year-long court battle with Marks & Spencer over ‘copycat’ gin bottles that featured LED lights. The High Court has ruled that Aldi infringed M&S’s copyright with its “Infusionist” gin bottles, meaning the German discounter could be forced to pay damages to its rival (The Telegraph).
The Grocer’s Daily Bread blog yesterday examined in detail how M&S managed to beat Aldi on copyright claims.
The Financial Times (£) takes a more detailed look at the career of the new Unilever CEO. “Twenty-five years after Hein Schumacher spent time at a Dove soap factory in southern Germany as part of a graduate traineeship at Unilever, he is returning as chief executive to scrub up the consumer goods group,” the paper writes.
Investment bankers who string together complex corporate takeovers have a new item on their checklists: avoid deal terms that force acquirers to refinance debt (The Financial Times £).
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